Parliament: A Sewer Runs Through It

With Parliament still subsumed by the slime and sludge of the MP expenses scandal, it seems the right time to dump a whole lot more effluent on our elected representatives. That's almost what's going to happen: a new supersewer is being constructed that will run alongside the Houses. Essentially a vast overflow pipe, work on the Thames Tunnel won't properly begin 'till 2013, but a boring rig has been erected in the river as part of the surveying work. The pipe will help alleviate the strain put upon the Victorian system designed by Joseph Bazalgette, a system germinated 150 years ago when the noses of MPs were troubled by the pestilential stench wafting into their chambers; a sewery soup that finds its contemporary equivalent in the smell of excess emanating from expense claim forms.